Student Experience: Current CELOP Student Shi Luo shares her experience touring the Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems

in Highlight
December 18th, 2017

By Shi Luo

All I knew about green building are just concepts from books and the Internet until we made our class trip to the Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems (CSE). After this tour, everything about green building became vivid to me. Fraunhofer CSE, according to their website, is “an applied research and development laboratory dedicated to building tomorrow’s energy future.”

The building is located at 5 Channel Center Street, Boston, MA, and there is a contrast between the ancient facade and the modern décor inside. Entering the lobby, I saw beautiful LED light belts changing colors and screens on walls showing graphs. I felt like I was in a science-fiction movie. It was hard for me to imagine that such a building interior with metropolitan style was reconstructed in a brick building more than 100-year-old! This renovation was initiated and conducted by CSE by means of several sustainable technologies as well as taking full advantage of the original characters and materials.

Our guide was Dr. Kurt Roth, Director of Building Energy Systems. Dr. Roth explained their motivation for focusing on solar energy, the roles they play in green building, the range of their clientele to us and he patiently answered all our questions. Then he led us to the monitor room, in which computers showed the temperature, moisture and other data of each layer of the building. How amazing that the status of the whole building was under control and water flows used for cooling and heating could be adjusted according to the statistics! In the photovoltaic laboratory we saw different kinds of machines for testing and Dr. Roth explained to us how they worked. We were told that we were lucky because the newly-built electricity storage control center had been completed only 2 days before our visit.

The tour lasted for an hour, and this hour seemed long enough that I really learned a lot; on the other hand, it was too short because I hoped to learn even more. For the first time I realized how many difficulties had to be overcome in pursuing application of the design of green buildings. After this tour, an interesting change in me is that I find myself subconsciously looking for green signs when I enter a building.